Conventional drawing programs enable its user to create and edit diagrams by providing a variety of shapes or objects that can be selected and placed within the diagrams. The user can use a pointing device, such as a mouse, to orient and size the shapes and objects, such as squares, rectangles, circles, triangles, decision blocks, etc., in the diagram as desired.
Some of these conventional drawing programs provide a feature which allows users to associate data to the shapes and objects in a diagram. For example, these drawing programs may provide menus or wizards, which assist or guide users to associate external data to objects in a diagram, thus enhancing the value of the diagrams. One major drawback to using the menus or wizards to import external data into objects in a diagram is that the menus and wizards are not intuitive in their use and require a high level of familiarity with the structure of both the data and the details of the diagram. One factor contributing to this is that the menus and wizards are ‘hidden’ under several layers of obfuscated menus.
Another factor is that the menus and wizards are ‘modal’ user interfaces that do not allow the user to see the effects of the decisions they are making. This is because the modal window has to be closed—i.e., the user is finished with associating the data to an object in a diagram—before the user can continue to operate the drawing program. Stated another way, the user is unable to see the results of the data associate operation until the user is finished associating the data to the object in the diagram. Still another factor is that the menus and wizards do not provide a view into the data that could be easily used while manipulating the diagram.
Accordingly, a technique for allowing users to link data to diagrams and to quickly recognize the value of the data linked to diagrams through a discoverable, intuitive interface will have significant utility.